Call It A Comeback
Os-Blog’s Rich Osbourne offers the following:
I do have an extra bedroom…but given his track record, I think I have good reason to doubt that he’d pay his half of the rent and utilities.
Just crash on Syverson’s couch for a couple months.
The least Syverson could do is cosign the short term lease.
This time Kevin McCullough takes a pass on reality predicting the debates will help Keyes and predicts a narrow Keyes victory–while taking a break from hawking Swift Boat nonsense.
My prediction – the more debates the two have – the better for Keyes. The less – the better for Obama. If they can get better than four debates scheduled – Keyes wins by a nose…and it will certainly be the most entertaining political race of the year!
The last phrase is true, but hardly in a positive way.
But the best part is this
You may remember Amb. Keyes soundly drilled Senator John McCain and Governor George W. Bush as he debated in 2000.
If by drilled, McCullough means convinced the world that John McCain and George Bush were sane and rational compared to the street preacher someone accidentally let in the door, McCullough may have a point.
Jacob Weisberg of Slate had the best coverage of the debates
One: The First Republican Debate.
Alan Keyes was running against Vladimir Illych Lenin. Keyes thinks that the other side actually won the Cold War and that he is the only one who knows about this. “We must get rid of the socialist structures that control our government beginning with the income tax itself,” he declared at the outset, explaining that he would prefer to fund the federal government with tariffs, duties, and excise taxes. He then tried to pick a fight with Cokie about whether the Catholic Church had gone socialist, too. Wearing a TV-unfriendly blooming lilac tie and a shirt that matched the color of his suit, he appeared to be having some kind of fit through most of the debate. I’m not sure that his technique of simply shouting over the moderator when his time is up is going to be effective.
Two: Keyes Loses It.
The second Republican debate was enlivened by the presence of two hecklers who got inside the Dartmouth auditorium where the town hall-style forum was taking place. One, a young woman, shouted that military spending should be cut to provide better health care until she was ejected from the hall. The other, Alan Keyes, ranted and raved about a variety of topics but was allowed to remain.
Keyes is an intelligent man, but tonight he seemed truly deranged. In response to a question put to all the candidates about whether they supported a flat tax, Keyes declared that the income tax was both socialism and slavery. “The income tax is a form of tax that was advocated by Marx and Lenin because it cedes in principle to the government control of EVERY LAST DOLLAR that is made or earned in income,” he bellowed, walking to the edge of the stage. “THINK ABOUT IT,” he shouted at the audience. “If I have to give you a percentage of my income and you get to determine the percentage, how much are you in control of? HOW MUCH? ANSWER IT!!! ALL OF IT, EVERY LAST BIT OF IT.”
That’s just the beginning, read on.
Three: Bush Debates:
Keyes did not disappoint those who missed his antics last time. Asked about his allegation that the media treat him in a racist fashion, he stuck to his guns, saying he wasn’t covered by the press, despite his obvious appeal to GOP voters, because “blackout means black out.” At one point Keyes attacked Bush’s proposed tax cuts as insufficient by saying that we shouldn’t “get down on our knees and thank Massa Bush for letting us keep more of our own money,” describing that as “thinking like slaves.” After the debate, Keyes once again came into the media filing center and repeated his nutty performance from the last New Hampshire debate virtually word for word. “You ignore my successes, just as you ignored my ancestors’ successes,” he exploded at a harmless question. “And then you want to tell me you’re not a racist! You better think about it, my friend! You better think about what you’re doing!”
Nobody called Keyes on the most outrageous thing he said in the debate, that atrocities in Kosovo were mostly “propaganda” devised by the Clinton administration in order to manipulate the American public into supporting a war. It was something Noam Chomsky might have said–or Pat Buchanan.
Master Debater indeed. I’m sure Obama is hiding in the closet.
Four: The Arizona Debate: Bush Brought to Book
No news was good news for Alan.
Five: The Iowa Debate: Bush Fouls Off
if it wasn’t for the fact that Iowa is the first caucus state, would share my view that we don’t need ethanol subsidies. It doesn’t help anybody.” McCain was booed for this answer. The others–Hatch, Bauer, Bush, Forbes, and Keyes–were quick to protest their fervent support for this boondoggle, which violates every known conservative principle but draws cheers in the corn belt. McCain’s handling of this issue, in contrast to every other candidate in the race, is the definition of political courage.
Heh.
Six: Anarchy in the GOP
ut McCain’s best sport came when Keyes asked him a lunatic question premised on Keyes’ not understanding that McCain was joking when he said he was a big fan of the thrash band Nine Inch Nails. Keyes accused McCain of “aiding and abetting cultural murder” for saying he liked such music.
McCain rolled his eyes, giggled, and turned into a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. “Can I get a lifeline?” he asked Russert.
“I’m a father and I’m not laughing,” Keyes responded.
“I haven’t been able to entertain you very often in the past,” McCain shot back, rolling his eyes and giggling some more.
Keyes, who was wearing the exploding lilac necktie that is often a harbinger of one of his “episodes,” also took the mayhem as a prompt to express his truest self. In other words, he jumped on the nearest soapbox and started ranting to no one in particular about such evils as atheism, homosexuality, and Tim Russert. He lacked only a sandwich board proclaiming, “The End is Near.” But Keyes has one great advantage in an up-for-grabs situation, which is that you literally can’t interrupt him. He comes up for air less often than a dolphin.
Read the whole article–I think this was one of the best pieces of political reporting to capture the feel of a debate I’ve ever read. Having watched it on TV, it certainly captured my take on it.
Seven: Iowa GOP Debate: “Waiting for Godot” Version
Have to read the whole thing.
Eight: Republicans Test Their Metal
During tonight’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, Gary Bauer criticized his fellow conservative Republican Alan Keyes for flinging himself into a mosh pit to the music of Rage Against the Machine.
In case you didn’t actually watch tonight’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, this really did happen. The exchange raised a number of urgent questions. 1) What was Ambassador Keyes doing in a mosh pit? (Answer: trying to secure the support of Michael Moore, the left-wing filmmaker.) 2) Does Bauer listen to a lot of heavy metal? (Answer: Apparently not, since he first called the band “The Machine Rages On.”) 3) Why is either of these no-hope religious zealots still in the race? (Answer: For the same reason they’re flinging themselves into mosh pits at the behest of radical documentary filmmakers; because they’re running to get attention.) 4) What does Orrin Hatch’s wife, Elaine, think about Korn? (Answer: We may never know.)
If you really want to get into it, Bauer had a bit of a point. Keyes, who in a previous debate accused John McCain of lending aid and comfort to fans of Nine Inch Nails, was participating, however facetiously, in the Caucasian version of the gangster culture that he thinks is destroying America. At the very least, moshing with Michael Moore was the height of hypocrisy. But if you start to take Keyes seriously enough to criticize him in this way, he has already won his battle, which is to not be ignored.
Nine: The South Carolina GOP Debate
Bush nailed!: Alan Keyes had a powerful moment–and for my money pretty much won the debate–when he blasted George W. Bush for kowtowing to an audience at Bob Jones University. Keyes himself spoke at Bob Jones, but as he noted, he confronted his audience over the university’s bigoted policies by talking about his Indian-born wife and his Catholic beliefs. Bush rolled his eyes while Keyes was criticizing him and then gave a truly lame and offensive response about how his brother married a “Mexican girl” who had become “a fabulous part of our family.” Keyes then had at him again: “Sir, you said nothing about the religious and racial bigotry that had to be dealt with.” This was the most stirring moment of the debate. McCain then piled on by saying that if he had been invited to Bob Jones, he would have done what Keyes did–gone, but condemned the ban on interracial dating as “incredibly cruel and stupid.” Keyes unfortunately compromised this very strong anti-racist message later in the debate when he stepped forward to defend racial profiling.
OK, score one for Keyes that night.
Ten: The Last Republican Debate, Please
LOS ANGELES–For a brief period earlier this week, when John McCain and George W. Bush were both threatening to participate in tonight’s debate by satellite, there was a prospect that the “live” event would consist of Alan Keyes shouting at a TV set.
Drilled ’em all right. Drilled right into laughter.
In 1992, he was asked to run for Senate again and won the Republican Party primary outright. But he again lost, taking just 29 percent of the vote against Sen. Barbara Mikulski.
As late as 2000, his 1992 Senate campaign owed creditors $54,000, though Keyes ultimately settled the debt by paying a percentage of what the campaign owed. He still owes creditors a total of $524,000 for his 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns, according to federal campaign filings. But he told the State Central Committee that he is taking care of that debt, Syverson said.
Umm…why yes, he’s running up another debt.
Kirk Dillard must be having a bad day after realizing he just bought a big ‘ole sour lemon:
But some GOP committee members questioned why the problem did not come up when the panel interviewed Keyes earlier in the week or when former Illinois Attorney General Tyrone Fahner screened Keyes for any potential problems.
“Mr. Keyes never talked about having liens on his personal taxes,” said state Sen. Kirk Dillard of Hinsdale.
Dillard, who is also DuPage County GOP chairman, pledged to campaign for Keyes, but he sounded decidedly lukewarm.
“If he’s the nominee, I will do my best to sell him,” Dillard said.
It gets better though:
“Every Keyes zealot that waltzes into my political office better leave with a George Bush and a county coroner yard sign,” Dillard said. “I can’t afford to not harness the power of Keyes, [even] when there are drawbacks to Ambassador Keyes.”
How does the County Coroner feel about natural law?
Obama’s team insists they are not worried about the flurry of national attention Keyes is already receiving.
“You can walk over to State and Madison — which you should tell Mr. Keyes is where north and south and east and west are divided here in the city,” said Obama adviser David Axelrod. “You could walk over to State and Madison, light yourself on fire and get attention.
“This isn’t about getting attention. It’s not about generating heat. It’s about shedding some light. So, we’ll let him generate heat. We’re going to continue to try to shed some light.”
Remember Rule #2
Via Fresh Paint’s Cynical
A fascinating exercise in his views on humility
His 1979 doctoral dissertation, “Ambition and Statesmanship,” was based on the writings of Alexander Hamilton and inspired, according to his graduate adviser, by a wickedly insightful quote from Hamilton: “Love of fame (is) the ruling passion of the noblest minds.”
“He is not lacking in self-confidence,” said Jack Pitney, a former Republican National Committee official who now teaches politics at Claremont McKenna College. “He sees himself as a teacher, and the race is a wonderful classroom ? hundreds of thousands of students, and they’re all paying attention.”
Vasyl in comments:
Have you noticed how often Keyes and his supporters cite 19th century politicians and precedents? It’s almost like they think they actually are fighting the political battles of that century, not debating the issues facing 21st century America.
I liked Josh Marshall’s comments about Keyes’s eloquence — that it is spellbinding, but has a cartoonish quality about it. Having read some of his speeches and columns, I have an rudimentary theory about this.
Keyes’s grammar and syntax are not modern. He has more in common with orators from the 19th century than he does with the great speakers (Reagan, Clinton, Blair, Obama) of our day.
Doesn’t this sound like Keyes: “I now wish to ask you whether that principle was right or wrong which guaranteed to every State and every community the right to form and regulate their domestic institutions to suit themselves.”
It’s not a Keyes quote; it’s a sentence from Stephen Douglas’s speech at one of the debates in 1858.
What about this one: “The practical foundation of all the rights and privileges of the individual citizen is the rights that inhere in the citizen body as a whole, the rights of the people and of the state governments. The latter effectively embody their ability to resist abuses of national power. Such rights include the right to elect representatives, and to be governed by laws made and enforced through them.”
That’s Keyes in 2003, even though it sounds like Douglas in 1858.
The theory is this: Keyes lives in the 19th century. He has adopted the trappings of a free black man from that time period, and it informs his opinions, his manners, his outlook, and even his speaking style.
I admit, this is just a rough theory — but it certainly explains why Keyes ignores every constitutional and political development since the Civil War.
Maybe he just thinks he’s Jesus.
No, not help him get elected.
But Alan Keyes needs a place to live in Illinois, and quick. He can’t sign a year lease, and needs to move it immediately — so that limits his choices.
We can do a great service by offering him suggestions on places to move: flophouses, SROs, the local Y.
OPEN THREAD!
(stolen shamelessly from the inbox with a reader suggestion–thanks)
Tom Cross is running one hell of an operation–go to your right and click on Cross TV–they are using the DCCC’s idea and have a video trailer for a series of episodes promoting Cross and some strong House challengers for the GOP–all of whom are actually addressing issues Illinoisans face. Moy is pretty impressive from what I saw.
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